An Israeli man hangs up a poster of Binyamin Netanyahu. As polls opened Tuesday, the current prime minister made a last-ditch plea to his supporters to go out and vote.
Photograph: Lior Mizrahi/Getty Images

Israel’s prime minister has made a last-ditch attempt to rally his supporters as the country went to the polls, with an incendiary warning that a high turnout of Israeli Arab voters could threaten his party’s hold on power.

Israel elections: voters take to polls as Netanyahu and Herzog make final pitches – live updates

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In a 28-second video posted on his Facebook page, Binyamin Netanyahu said Israeli Arabs were turning out “in droves” and urged his supporters to go out and vote.

“The right-wing government is in danger. Arab voters are heading to the polling stations in droves,” he wrote. “Left-wing NGOs are bringing them in buses.”

21% of Israel’s 8 million inhabitants are of Palestinian heritage, but turnout among them has been low in recent elections, standing at just 54% in 2013. This year, however, Israeli Arabs voters have been galvanized by a new united front bringing together four parties.

By midday, some 10% of Israeli Arabs had already voted – compared to just 3% at the same time in 2013. Lines were snaking out of the doors of polling stations in the northern Israeli Arab towns of Sakhnin and Arraba, as well as in Jaffa, near Tel Aviv.

Around 5,000 students studying in Jordan and the West Bank city of Jenin organised buses to drive them back home in the last 24 hours so they could vote.

The Joint List, an alliance of three Arab parties and one Arab-Jewish party, is counting on high voter turnout from the Arab sector in Tuesday’s election to make them the third largest party in the Knesset, behind the incumbent Likud and the opposition Zionist Union. Final polls ahead of the election showed them receiving between 13 and 15 out of the total 120 Knesset seats.

Joint List head Ayman Odeh, who voted in Haifa Tuesday morning, called on everyone to go out and vote. “Like every Arab citizen in the country today, I am excited to vote and be part of history and a turning point that will drastically change the reality of Arab citizens and of all citizens. I call on everyone to go out and vote, to believe it can be better here – that we, Arabs and Jews, can with our own hands, create a better future for our children.”

Responding to Netanyahu’s statement, Knesset member Dov Khenin, a member of the Arab-Jewish socialist Hadash party and the only Jewish Israeli with a realistic chance of being voted in on the Joint List, said the prime minister had “crossed a red line of incitement and racism” against the Arab citizens of Israel, who have every right to take part in the democratic system.

“Yes, we plan to be the third latest power in the next Knesset. And yes, we are calling on the Arab public to go out and vote. But every single mandate of ours is a mandate of peace and equality, of social and national justice. Our mandates, as opposed to those of the right, will represent the entire public, even those who do not vote for us,” the Joint List said in a statement.

Many voters who poured out of a polling station in central Jaffa said they had voted for the Joint List in the hopes that some kind of change will take place. “I want there to finally be an Arab minister in government,” said Abu Din Muhammad, 51, indicating his hope that if Isaac Herzog is the next prime minister, he will invite the Arabs to join the coalition, something that has never happened in Israeli history and which Herzog indicated he will not do.

A group of young women, their heads covered in hijab, refused to say their names but all nodded that they had voted for the Joint List in the hopes of “change” and that this was not their first time voting. “I voted Arabs in the past and I voted for Arabs today,” said Ibrahim Abu Lisan, a man in his 70s.

Michael Aboromanh, a Christian Arab from Jaffa in his 30s, voted for Herzog. “The country needs change and the only way to guarantee that change is to vote Bougie [Herzog].”

There were also some first-time voters. A 26-year-old resident of Jaffa who preferred to remain nameless said he had never voted before because it “wasn’t interesting. It’s good they joined up, it’s worth voting now”.

Rami Younis, 30, a Palestinian activist and writer with the independent Hebrew online magazine Local Call, said he usually boycotts the elections.

“I support the boycott discourse, but in order to develop this discourse, we need highly developed political consciousness. The unification of the Arab parties as a response to oppression is a testament to a very positive development,” he said. “I am voting for Palestinian unity on 1948 lands, in the hopes that our unity will be used as inspiration for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. I am voting for the Joint List despite their presence in the Knesset, not because of it.”

• This article was amended on 19 March 2015. Because of an editing error, an earlier version gave an incorrect figure for Israel’s population.